More on magnitude of priming in implicit memory tasks

Abstract

The effects of word frequency, length of the word, and type of word fragment in a fragment-completion test were investigated with 57 undergraduate students, 19-22 years. Priming with better performance on studied than on nonstudied words in this task was greater for low frequency words than for high frequency words and greater for fragments without the first letter than for fragments with the first letter. It was inferred that characteristics of fragments should be considered in any implicit memory task when the magnitude of priming is of interest. In general, word fragment-completion processes appear to be based on sources of information available in visual identification tasks.